incorruptible." Three times there is a reference to Plautus, and always
with a tone of chilly superiority which is too proud to break into an
open sneer. Yet among these haughty and frigid manifestoes some
felicity of phrase or of sentiment will suddenly remind us that here,
after all, we are dealing with one of the great formative intelligences
of literature; where, for instance, in the prologue to the lively and
witty comedy of _The Eunuch_, the famous line--

_Nullumst iam dictum quod non dictum sit prius--

drops with the same easy negligence as in the opening dialogue of _The
Self-Tormentor_, the immortal--

_Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto--_

falls from the lips of the old farmer. Congreve alone of English
playwrights has this glittering smoothness, this inimitable ease; if we
remember what Dryden, in language too splendid to be insincere, wrote of
his young friend, we may imagine, perhaps, how Caecilius and his circle
regarded Terence. Nor is it hard to believe that, had Terence, like
Congreve, lived into an easy and honoured old age, he would still have
rested his reputation on these productions of his early youth. Both
dramatists had from the first seen clearly and precisely what they had in
view, and had almost at the first stroke attained it: the very
completeness of the success must in both cases have precluded the
dissatisfaction through which fresh advances could alone be possible.

This, too, is one reason, though certainly not the only one, why, with
the death of Terence, the development of Latin comedy at once ceased. His
successors are mere shadowy names. Any life that remained in the art took